Ann Lindsey remembers feeling scared and hot when she made the phone call.

It was Aug. 25, 2010. The middle-school teacher was sitting in her car outside Jackson Middle School in Champlin during a 47-minute break from teacher training. Lindsey waited till she was on break and off school property because she worried the call might upset administrators in the Anoka-Hennepin school district.

She was calling an attorney at one of the nation’s leading civil rights groups to report the conditions facing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students in Minnesota’s largest school district.

Justin Aaberg, a gay freshman at Anoka High School who had been bullied, had killed himself the month before. He was one of seven students affiliated with the district to kill themselves in a little over a year and a half. Lindsey and other gay-rights advocates say four of those students identified themselves as gay. District officials say two did.

When asked to recall conditions for LGBT students in the district at that time, Lindsey used words such as “toxic,” “dangerous” and “fearful.”

When asked to describe them now, Lindsey started gushing a little.

“It’s a little magical to think about how far we’ve come,” Lindsey said. “I’m thrilled to say students can walk through the halls and feel safe. … The mood is much brighter; the (gay) slurs have decreased.”

Lindsey’s phone call sparked a lawsuit against the district the following summer by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. The suit took the district to task for failing to stop what it called repeated anti-gay bullying endured by six students at school. Chiefly to blame, the suit argued, was a district policy governing staff members’ stance on LGBT issues.

That policy has since been rescinded. Tuesday, March 5, marks the one-year anniversary of the lawsuit’s settlement, prompting the Anoka-Hennepin school board to adopt a historic consent decree outlining a host of tasks the district must undertake to better support LGBT students.

Though frustrations remain and viewpoints on the issue are nuanced, most people plugged in to the push for change in the district agree that while there is still a ways to go, life for LGBT students is getting better.

“Has it gotten better for everyone yet?” asked Jefferson Fietek, an outspoken teacher in the district and advocate for LGBT students. “No. Is it starting to head in that direction? Yes. Is it where we’ve needed to go for a long time? Yes.”

COMING A LONG WAY

District Superintendent Dennis Carlson need only open his work email to be reminded of the difference in the district.

Emails used to pour in daily from people on each side of the LGBT debate. These days, he gets one or two every couple of weeks.

With fewer eyes watching the district’s every move, Carlson said, staff members have started rolling out the measures promised in the consent decree.

The U.S. Justice Department is overseeing its five-year implementation and requires progress reports from the district.

Among the steps taken: The district hired a Title IX coordinator to deepen the staff’s understanding of the federal law protecting sex- and gender-based expression and hired a mental health coordinator to review the landscape in place for struggling students, according to information provided by the district.

Most staff members have been trained on their responsibility to report discrimination based on sexual orientation and on ways to intervene when they see it. A handful of students have been trained in how to prevent bullying.

Every school building now has an individual appointed to oversee reported incidents of bullying, and a form was added to the district’s website so students can report problems online.

There is also a comprehensive system in place to report and track bullying district-wide. All situations involving LGBT-related harassment must be reported to the district’s Title IX coordinator, Jennifer Cherry.

None of that information was consistently collected or reported before, Cherry said.

“I don’t know of another district in the country tracking (bullying) this comprehensively,” Cherry said.

She commended the district for “coming a long way in a short time.”

The efforts have helped clarify for staff how to respond to LGBT issues at school, said Julie Blaha, president of the district’s teachers union.

It also has boosted teachers’ confidence in the district’s commitment to change.

“When I know what I am supposed to do, when I know that the next person knows what to do, when you know the whole system is improving, it makes you more confident to take action,” Blaha said.

The attorney who filed the lawsuit in 2011 said he’s impressed with the district’s progress.

“I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but I can say I am personally unaware of any incident of anti-LGBT harassment at this point, and if there is one, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t dealt with in a really thoughtful and systematic way,” said Sam Wolfe. “That is the night-and-day difference between when we started our investigation and now.”

STUDENTS SEE CHANGES

Brittany “Lane” Geldert says the district is “more livable now.”

The Champlin Park High School sophomore, who identifies herself as bisexual, was one of the students represented in the lawsuit. Of those students, only she and Dylon Frei, an Anoka High sophomore, still attend school in Anoka-Hennepin.

Geldert said things feel different from the past, when she was regularly called anti-gay slurs and was harassed because she was a girl more interested in the rock band Tool than in fashion.

“It’s starting to change; not drastic, but it feels more like normal high school now,” she said.

She said she hasn’t been bullied once this year at Champlin Park, nor has she seen other LGBT students harassed.

Geldert said a friend was told by a teacher she couldn’t kiss her girlfriend in the hallway because it would “confuse” other students, but the teen reported it and the district handled it “right away.”

Frei also said school is better, though not “100 percent better.”

“I am starting to be friends with a lot of guys now, which is different for me, and they tell me all the time they have my back,” he said. “I feel protected.”

Frei, who is gay, says he used to receive death threats in middle school.

He still hears slurs in the hallway and reads them on Facebook, but Frei says he trusts something will be done to stop such things when they’re reported.

“There are actual consequences to things now,” he said.

It’s difficult to know how many of Frei’s and Geldert’s LGBT peers share their opinion about a shift. The district does not allow outside adults to attend meetings of students’ Gay Straight Alliance clubs, and a reporter’s attempt to talk with students at random at Coon Rapids High School was thwarted by staff.

One student who approached the reporter said she’s heard from her LGBT friends that since the lawsuit was settled, they are getting teased and pushed around less often in the hallways.

“Now people leave them alone; they don’t care anymore,” said Mykala Edner, a senior who identifies as bisexual. “Honestly I am a little proud of the leaps this school has taken … everyone seems more open.”

Other students who weren’t asked during interviews about their sexual orientation had varying opinions on whether bullying of LGBT students remains a problem in the district. Several said bullying in general is worst online. A few had never heard of the lawsuit against the district.

The first-trimester report submitted to the Justice Department this school year found 122 incidents of bullying in the district based on a student’s real or perceived sexual orientation, Cherry said.

With no baseline data to compare that with, it’s unknown if that number is up or down from years past, but staff members say they’ve heard of fewer incidents than before.

The number of students reporting bullying appears to have improved. Incidents in which a student told a parent about bullying jumped 14 percent since 2010, according to the district’s 2012 anti-bullying student survey. Reports to an adult at school went up 8 percent in that time.

WORK TO BE DONE

While pointing out progress, several staff members said considerable work remains before LGBT students feel at home in the district.

Much of what’s been done so far is at the surface level, Fietek and Lindsey said. Both said they would like to see the LGBT community reflected in the curriculum.

“We’ve had training on stopping gay slurs, but there are still teachers who don’t know how to engage in healthy LGBT conversations with students,” Lindsey said.

Blaha said some teachers are still uneasy about the issue.

“I think a lot of people still feel like the world is watching,” Blaha said.

Media attention flared again a few months ago when the school board appointed Parents Action League member Bryan Lindquist to its newly formed anti-bullying task force. Lindquist, a district parent, has spoken out against homosexuality in the past. The district said the choice helped ensure the panel represented the spectrum of viewpoints in the community.

Moves such as that make Justin Aaberg’s mother worry about the intentions of those at the top.

“I’m tired of the school district administration … and school board thinking of themselves first and students last,” Tammy Aaberg wrote in an email. “It’s all about who you ask for help if you receive any.”

Carlson said his staff always has supported students and will continue to try to get better.

“There continues to be a pretty far-left view that we’re not doing enough and a pretty far-right view that we are doing too much,” Carlson said. “I expect that debate will continue.”

The district is one year into a five-year consent decree, Cherry pointed out. Meaningful change will take time, she said.

“Right now, we are talking a lot about laws and policies … but I think with time, we will see that message shifting to more inclusion for all,” Cherry said. “That’s what we need for students to move from this superficial feeling of safety that ‘nobody is going to hit me’ to more of a feeling that this community is really my home.”

Moments such as one Lindsey witnessed earlier this year make her optimistic.

The current curriculum integrator at Jackson Middle School heard a student say the word “gay” in the hallway and stopped to ask him why he used it.

The student “was trying to make sure a young girl who was gay wasn’t being teased,” Lindsey said. “That was a wonderfully shocking thing to hear.”

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